Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Saturday Apr 7, 2012

Filed under: Notices 14 comments

 PAX Meetups - Who wants books?Previous Post

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No pictures. No banter. I’m tired, addled, and more tired. However, need to announce stuff:

If I met you Friday night: Thanks for stopping by. I’m sorry if I couldn’t give you the attention you deserve. I met so many people and it’s all a blur now. Still, even if all I gave you was a handshake: It was great meeting you.
I don’t have any books left. I brought as many as could fit in the luggage we brought. Sold them all in under a minute. I’m still happy to sign stuff if you come to the LRR panel Sat. night, but I don’t have any copies of The Witch Watch to sell. Sorry. We’re going to set up some other system so you can get your hands on autographed copies. More on this next week, when we get home.
Looking forward to Sunday. It’s Easter Sunday, and there are STILL passes for sale. (This never happens.) I’m really hoping the show floor will be slow and we can get in to see the hard-to-see stuff without waiting for an hour.
Lots of exciting gaming news. So much to talk about. But today is Rest Day. I’ma go pass out for a few more hours, then stagger back over to the convention center. I’ll turn this mayhem into content at some later time.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Josh Plays Shogun 2 Part 18: Anno Domini

By Josh Posted Thursday Apr 5, 2012

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 48 comments

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Next PostAlan Wake EP1: Hey, Listen! 

With Nobunaga’s victory at Okehazama, the way has been opened for us to finally conquer central Japan. Nobunaga’s exploits have garnered a fearsome reputation for him amongst his peers â€" although that reputation might not be completely accurate…

Yep, he goes into harm’s way all the time. He didn’t spend the entire battle sitting in a forest at the top of a hill at the very rear of his army or anything, I don’t know what you’re talking about…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Josh Plays Shogun 2 Part 18: Anno Domini”

Josh Viel is the primary editor and producer of the Spoiler Warning video series. You can support the show by backing the Patreon.

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PAX Meetups – Who wants books?

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Apr 3, 2012

Filed under: Notices 30 comments

 PAX East: Friday SchedulePrevious Post

Next PostPAX East 2012 - Saturday 

Lots of people have expressed an interest in buying books from me at PAX. The concern is that books are heavy, and I don’t want to carry around ten books just to sell one. If you want a book, please let me know in the comments.

The two places you will find me, for sure, are:

Friday 10:30pm, Wyvern Theatre – The Escapist Movie Night

Saturday 10:00pm, Naga Theatre – An Evening with LoadingReadyRun

I might be found at other places and times, but these are your two guaranteed meetups. If you want a book, it would be super-nice if you could tell me which day so I don’t run out or over-pack.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Next PostPAX East 2012 - Saturday 

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Mass Effect 3 Ending:
Tasteful, Understated Nerdrage

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Apr 3, 2012

Filed under: Movies 267 comments

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It’s obvious I’m a fan of long-form game analysis, particularly story-based. I love to write about games, read about games, watch reviews of games, and talk about games. In a way, the retrospective is just another stage of the experience.

This is producing a strange side-effect where I’m starting to feel glad that the Mass Effect 3 ending was so completely awful in every way, lacking in both coherence and closure, and completely discarding core themes in the last minutes of the game. Sure, a high-profile series ended in a train wreck and a great chunk of lore-rich world-building has been reduced to pretentious mush, but the resulting conversations and deconstructions have been more interesting to me than the game itself. I enjoyed assembling my own list of objections, and I’m still collecting new objections to my running mental tally.

Here is yet another person stepping up to deconstruct the ending. Yes, they lead off with a nod to Red Letter Media, but the review doesn’t go that way. This is actually the most highbrow one I’ve found so far, and the author plays things very straight.

Link (YouTube)

The bit about the Socratic exercise really resonated with me. Yes, this is the thing I love most about sci-fi.

I’ll actually be glad when people stop saying, “You’re ripping off Red Letter Media!” when someone does a long-form analysis. There’s a lot of room for different approaches in this gig, and the more the merrier.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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PAX East: Friday Schedule

By Shamus Posted Monday Apr 2, 2012

Filed under: Notices 68 comments

 Minecraft DiscussionPrevious Post

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This weekend, Josh and I are going to meet for the first time at PAX East. I’m going to be appearing on a Q&A panel hosted by the Escapist, along with MovieBob and some of the Loading Ready Run crew.

Here is how PAX works:

The main attraction is the show floor. In the middle of the convention center is a massive (airplane hanger sized) area where different companies have booths for showing off their goods, games, demos, previews, and otherwise vying for attention from the press and gaming public. Some of these “Booths” stretch the definition of the term, and are more like self-contained marketing theme parks. In particular, Xbox has enough territory to declare themselves a sovereign nation and field an army to defend it. People are saying they might even have enough space for two people to play with the Kinect. The mind reels.

Around the edges of this mayhem are tiny booths owned by starry-eyed indie developers and middle-aged guys selling overpriced T-shirts, buttons, posters, and other gaming culture accoutrements.

Elsewhere in the convention center are other ongoing attractions: An arcade, a beanbag lounge, a PC lounge, etc. These are quiet places to get off your feet and recharge yourself, your Nintendo DS, or both.

In the outer rooms are “panels”. These events can encompass a lot of different things. Movie screenings. Presentations. Interactive question & answer events. Some are aimed at the press, or developers, or the public, or certain gaming demographics. Read the schedule before you go and see if you’re interested in any of them.

Last year I didn’t have a game plan, and this resulted in a lot of spine-destroying hiking around. This year, I have a careful plan.

For the curious, here is my schedule for Friday. If an event isn’t here, it doesn’t mean I don’t care about it. It probably just conflicts with whatever else I’ve got going on.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “PAX East: Friday Schedule”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Spoiler Warning: Questions

By Shamus Posted Monday Apr 2, 2012

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 208 comments

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Next PostJosh Plays Shogun 2 Part 18: Anno Domini 

I sat down with the rest of the cast Sunday night and we made it official: Barring any unforeseen difficulties, our next game will be Alan Wake. The game has a lot of interesting hooks for discussion: In-game advertising, the changing nature of survival horror as a genre, Stephen King, a troubled development history, and so on. It’s also short by the standards of the show, which will let us move on to Mass Effect 3 before we lose our passion for it.

We’re moving to five cast members: Chris, Mumbles, Rutskarn, Josh and myself. I have no idea how we’ll keep it on the rails. We’ll see how it goes.

Reader Atma asks via email:

[…]Well, i for one would like to know how the new format has impacted your audience, if the pipeline has improved, if the custom endings hit their goal (keeping people watching up to the end). I’d also like know out of curiosity how you are financing yourself on this show (if you are at all); i mean it’s a lot of work and although i imagine it’s nice having fun among a group of smart and talented people, it’s still a lot of work.

The pipeline is the same as it ever was, except that Josh keeps raising his standards as he gets better at Adobe Premiere, which kind of negates the time he saves.

We’re not making any money from the show. Individual episodes only score a few thousand views. Less than half the people who read the site actually watch the show. It’s probably not worth turning on advertising for that. Ultimately, it would probably boil down to a dollar an episode. Split between the cast members this would be joke money, not worth the time and expense of distributing it. Even if we gave it all to Josh, it’s still pretty much a tiny payout in the face of how much time he dumps into it. I get the impression that advertising really isn’t worth it until you’re into the tens of thousands.

The coming weekend is PAX, and the next weekend is recovering-from-PAX, so the next season won’t begin until the week of April 22.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Interview With MeNET

By Shamus Posted Sunday Apr 1, 2012

Filed under: Links 57 comments

 Streets of BedlamPrevious Post

Next PostHomestar Runner 

On Friday I sat down with some of the guys at Middle Earth Network and talked a bit about the Witch Watch, Project Frontier, DM of the Rings, and other assorted topics.

You can hear an archived version of the interview here.

It was fun. Thanks again to the MeNet guys for having me on.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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